Honor those who serve

Ready to Leave – 4th of August

On this day in 1957 at a hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, a young couple, both US Army veterans (she was a Sergeant, he was a Corporal when they were Honorably Discharged), experienced the birth of their second child, a boy, to whom they gave the Welsh name of Kevin… And 58 years later this guy and his bride (Grace) were boarding a ship to travel back to the lands of some of his ancestors (Wales, England, and Ireland).

Do I get credit for continuing the Run=on by using ellipsis???

Let me explain something before we get this voyage underway ~ I hate commercial flying. Actually, I HATE commercial flying. I like flying, and have since I first boarded a 707 when I was 13. I have flown on commercial jets, on private 4 seater Pipers, experienced barrel-rolls and loop-dee-loops in a WW2 Navy Trainer, been in a Bell Ranger Medi-copter, been in various points in Illinois aboard a Sikorsky helicopter, been bounced around and out of the jump seat of a King Air twin turbo-prop a few times. I have been on flights as short as 30 minutes, and as long as 19 hours.

It is a published fact that the seats & seating in commercial airplanes are shrinking… reduce the legroom, reduce the width and depth of seats, and you can cram more seats inside the interior, which means more money coming in every time the aircraft takes off… (some sources ~ Wall Street Journal, Time, USA Today, LA Times, Telegraph) . The benefit of this is more people crowded together, shoulder to shoulder, little room to move and breathe, sharing coughs, sneezes, halitosis…and did you know that you can smell kimchi when a person sweats after eating it??!

There is an option for a trans-Atlantic trip (such as our trip to Wales) and although it is somewhat “old school”, it is definitely much more civilized. Cunard is a part of the Carnival Cruise Line Family. Cunard operates a small fleet of three passenger ships: The Queen Mary 2; the Queen Victoria, and their newest addition, the Queen Elizabeth. To quote Wikipedia: “At the moment, Cunard is the only shipping company to operate a scheduled passenger service between Europe and North America.” We chose to travel trans-Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2 from New York to Southampton, England.